Origins: Enid Yandell and the Design Competition

Count Paul Bajnotti gave the city of Providence $10,000 in the day's currency for the creation of the fountain, though it was agreed the city’s mayor would select a panel to adjudicate a design competition.[1]

The commission, composed of Mayor William Cotter Baker, John Carter Brown, and Sidney Burleigh,[2] ultimately selected an unsolicited entry[3] by sculptor Enid Yandell—the only woman to submit a proposal.[4] At the time, Yandell (1869-1934) had already established herself as a prominent sculptor, a student of Auguste Rodin[5] and the first woman accepted into the Natural Sculpture Society of America.[6] For her entry, Yandell submitted “a plaster model, the principal feature of which was the central group, which was symbolical of the struggle of life.”>[7]

Upon learning that a female sculptor had submitted a proposal for the committee’s review, the “women of Providence” took “intense interest […] They were urgent in their plea to the commissioners that Miss Yandell’s design shout be selected.”[8] Fascinatingly, though, the periodical which reported on this fervor was at pains to emphasize that the ‘sentiment’ (read: emotionality) of these women did not sway the “impartiality [read: masculine, unemotional rationality] of the commissioners in their judgment of Miss Yandell’s work”[9] This reportage inadvertently raises the issue of female representation in public sculpture—an issue that must be broached, too, when discussing the Fountain’s commission, composition, and placement. In this instance, the all-male committee denied that it was “most suitable and appropriate that [Yandell’s design] should receive the award.”[10]  In so doing, the committee sends the message that the public commemorative representation of female life and bodies is not a matter in which women’s opinions need be taken into consideration. Before discussing how questions of female representation bear on discussion of the Fountain’s other features, however, I will describe the work’s context and then its composition in greater detail.

While in the early stages of executing the commission, though, Yandell returned to Paris, where she hoped to find optimal working conditions and to benefit from the criticism of Rodin, her former teacher.[11] Later on, Yandell would consult the named partners of the architectural firm Morris, Butler, and Rodman—three young men educated at the École des Beaux-Arts, a school which exerted great influence over Yandell and many of her contemporaries. [12], [13], [14] In fact, the Bajnotti Fountain typifies many staples of Beaux-Arts aesthetic through its neoclassicism, heavy ornamentation, sculptural use of bronze sculpture, as well as its “naturalism and dynamic treatment of form and surface.”[15]